My father practiced social distancing before anybody knew what it was.
Actually, he practiced it on my brother, Ken, and me.
One day he said to us, “Boys, I need you to go stay a couple of weeks with your Mama Stevens, or your Mama and Papa Hudgins.”
“Why can’t we stay home?” I asked pitifully.
“You can’t stay here,” Daddy said firmly.
It didn’t take us long to decide. Mama Stevens lived in the city and had an indoor bathroom, while our daddy’s parents lived on the farm with a 75-yard-long walk and an under-the-bed option for relief.
Still, we chose the farm because Mama Hudgins was a great cook and we were growing boys.
I was about four months away from nine years old; Ken was 12. We had to eat.
So we packed a few things and Daddy drove us to Belmont, a farming community in the south end of our county in northeast Georgia. Belmont had a Baptist church, a general store and railroad tracks down the middle that carried freight trains from Gainesville, Ga. to Athens, about 30 miles from Belmont.
And it had a lot nice folks who checked on each other bearing food. Mama Hudgins was one of them.
Mama didn’t waste any time getting us situated. She sequestered us inside Aunt Gertie’s cold bedroom, pulled the window shades down, turned the calendar to the wall so we wouldn’t strain our eyes trying to figure out the day and shut the door. We stayed there most of the time, immobile under 84 pounds of quilts, and eating oh, I don’t know, probably Mama’s homemade chicken soup and other light fare.
Near the end of our stay, we were set free to see the sunshine again and enjoy some real food – ham, gravy, biscuits, fried chicken and other country delicacies produced on Mama’s wood-burning stove.
Mama even taught us how to embroider … not that we needed to learn. Mama and Papa had lived through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, but I doubt they did much social distancing because of it.
They were already socially distanced down on the farm.
The only gathering of people they saw was at Belmont Baptist and Papa – a deacon – decided at some point to distance himself from church after his doctor told him to avoid crowds because of a heart murmur.
Here we are in 2020 and we’re social distancing, wearing masks, spraying stuff and washing our hands continuously, because of another pandemic.
I’m not complaining; I understand why.
But it was hard awfully hard for an eight-year-old to understand why his daddy would ship his boys to the farm when they were sick and wanted to stay home.
We didn’t have the plague.
We had the red measles. But I understood when we got back home.
Snuggled inside a bassinet in our living room was a pretty, pink baby sister named Joyce Elaine Hudgins.
She was spotless.
Sometimes, social distancing is the right thing to do.
Phil Hudgins is senior editor of Community Newspapers Inc. Email him at phudgins@cninewspapers.com.